A Productive and Scalable Actor-Based Programming System for PGAS Applications
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Abstract
The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model is well suited for executing irregular applications on distributed HPC systems due to its efficient support for short, one-sided messages. In this talk, we introduce a new programming system for PGAS applications, in which point-to-point remote operations can be expressed as fine-grained asynchronous active messages. A key observation is that these applications can benefit significantly from an actor-based model that moves computations to data as opposed to the traditional HPC approach of moving data to computations. Our approach can also be viewed as extending the classical Bulk Synchronous Processing (BSP) model to a Fine-grained-Asynchronous Bulk-Synchronous Parallelism (FA-BSP) model. We will discuss the programming models and runtime systems developed in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory to realize the FA-BSP execution model, and present recent results illustrating the benefits of this approach on current HPC systems.
Looking to the future, we will discuss some initial work-in-progress for hardware support of the FA-BSP execution model being undertaken in the Flow-Optimized Reconfigurable Zones of Acceleration (FORZA) project led by Georgia Tech that is supported by the IARPA AGILE program. The FORZA project is pursuing a software-hardware co-design approach to address the signicant disruptions currently underway in HPC hardware and software. In hardware, there is a Pandora's box of new architectural approaches being proposed to sustain performance improvements beyond the end of Moore’s Law. In software, there is an increased urgency for enabling large-scale data analytics applications for societal benefits. To address these challenges, the FORZA project is focusing on large-scale graph analytics as an important exemplar of the challenges being faced by many PGAS applications that unfortunately perform below 1% efficiency on today's systems.
We would like to acknowledge all members of the Habanero lab and all participants in the FORZA project from Georgia Tech, Cornelis Networks, Lucata, Tactical Computing Labs, UC Santa Barbara, and U. Notre Dame. The opinions in this talk are solely those of the speaker and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of any of these organizations, the ODNI, IARPA, or U.S. Government.
Background references:
- A Productive and Scalable Actor-Based Programming System for PGAS Applications", Sri Raj Paul, Akihiro Hayashi, Kun Chen, Vivek Sarkar. ICCS 2022 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1007/978-3-031-08751-6_17).
- IARPA AGILE program (https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/agile).
Bio
Professor Vivek Sarkar is Chair of the School of Computer Science and the Stephen Fleming Chair for Telecommunications in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He conducts research in multiple aspects of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, including programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, and debuggers for parallel, heterogeneous, and high-performance computer systems. He is also the Principal Investigator for the FORZA project.
Sarkar started his career in IBM Research after obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford University, supervised by John Hennessy. His research projects at IBM include the PTRAN automatic parallelization system led by Fran Allen, the ASTI optimizer for IBM’s XL Fortran product compilers, the open-source Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, and the X10 programming language developed in the DARPA HPCS program. He was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology during 1995-2007, and Senior Manager of the Programming Technologies Department at IBM Research during 2000-2007.
After moving to academia, Sarkar has mentored more than 30 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory, first at Rice University since 2007, and now at Georgia Tech since 2017. Researchers in his lab have developed the Habanero-C/C++ and Habanero-Java programming systems for parallel, heterogeneous, and distributed platforms. While at Rice, Sarkar was the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science, created a new sophomore-level course on the fundamentals of parallel programming and a three-course Coursera specialization on parallel, concurrent, and distributed programming.
Sarkar is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and is co-chair of the recently created CRA-Industry committee. Sarkar is also the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.